Raspberry Pi: Hiding a Computer Inside Your Computer

What better way to contain your Raspberry Pi than to put it inside your desktop!

At some point in your life, you've probably stood staring contemplatively at your computer and thought to yourself, "I wonder if I could shove another computer inside this one." Well, if you haven't, John Roach certainly has.

John had a Raspberry Pi that he had been using to download files for a while. It had lived in an old VHS cassette, which is a fairly amusing case on its own. However, he wanted to put it somewhere that made a little more sense and ensured it would be powered up and operational any time his computer was running.

Ultimately, he had the idea to hide it within the CD-ROM of his computer. This idea would render his disk drive inoperable, but honestly most people would agree that we are inevitably moving away from that media anyway.

The Raspberry Pi placed on top of the stripped CD-ROM PCB.

He started by gutting the disk drive and pulling the printed circuit board (PCB) out. He removed most of the bits from the CD-ROM's PCB in order to make it as flat as possible. This would allow him to place the Raspberry Pi on top of the original PCB and patch into the power connector. The rear of the drive was cut to allow access to the USB and Ethernet ports, and then the entire system can be placed back into its bay on the desktop computer.

Final result, all enclosed.

Now, when he powers up his main computer, the Raspberry Pi is powered up too! As you can see in the picture above, he is currently using USB storage media, however, he intends to use network-attached storage once the unit is put back inside his desktop. I can't help but imagine the possibilities of using multiple drive bays like a mini server rack inside your workstation!

Reusing a laptop monitor ends up being a financial wash. You have to purchase a driver board for it, since most have the driver integrated into the motherboard. Often, those driverboards end up costing the same as a more modern and possibly higher quality LCD.

That's a nice RasPi case. My only concern is heat: that's a RasPi Model B with a rev 1.0 PC board. Because of a design oversight corrected in the rev 2.0 PCB, the USB/LAN chip on some of those rev 1.0 boards overheat. In an enclosed case inside a warm PC, you could easily have overheating problems if there's a lot of Ethernet activity.

This only occurs with some rev 1.0 units. You can get heat sinks for the RasPi SoC and USB/LAN chips, which helps.